All posts by : Lances TextBox

1 of 5 | Quickly create Amazon Associates links - I don’t know if there is already an easy way to do this that I just don’t know about, or what…but it sure seems like there should be.  I always find it a pain in the ass to create Amazon Associates links – I’ve always had to go to their website, click “Build Links”, click “Text Links’, paste in the URL to the product page, etc.  Annoying.  The URL isn’t that difficult to build, so I just created a little bookmarklet that will do it for me.  You can use it with your own Amazon Associates tag if you like.  Just go to AWSLink, type in your Associates tag, click “Generate Bookmarklet”, and drag the link into your bookmarks.  Then when you’re on an Amazon product page you’d like to link to, just......

2 of 5 | Building Enterprise Mashups using RSSBus - Microsoft MVP Richard Seroter started a series of posts on building enterprise mashups using RSSBus.  Part 1, and Part 2. A few weeks ago our Executive Director / Chief Architect / Technology Overlord recently asked me to build a real, live enterprise mashup application to demonstrate for our IT leadership group. Our goal was to show that RSSBus could be used to quickly and efficiently aggregate data in compelling new ways.   In the next few posts, I’m going to walk through our use case, and how I built a solution to solve this. In this first post, Richard provides an outline of his problem, the solution he decided on, and how he would use RSSBus to help accomplish his goal. In the......

3 of 5 | PowerShell – Base64 Encode/Decode a string - An easy way to convert data to/from base64 (or uuencode/uudecode, quoted-printable, url encode/url decode, JIS, Yenc, hex, or even creating md5 or sha1 hashes) is to use the NetCmdlets convert-data cmdlet. To encode: PS C:\> convert-data -data "Hello, World!" -to base64 Data Size Format ---- ---- ------ SGVsbG8sIFdvcmxkIQ== 20 base64 To decode: PS C:\> convert-data -data $encoded.Data data -from base64 Data Size Format ---- ......

4 of 5 | SUP – Simple Update Protocol for feed services - This is cool – FriendFeed created the SUP protocol (format) for web services that produce multiple feeds.  In order to reduce tons of frequent feed polling, services can offer one “SUP feed” that indicates what feeds on the service have been updated. It works very simply.  Each RSS/Atom feed includes a link tag with that feeds SUP-ID (so each feed has its own SUP-ID) and the URL of the SUP feed.  The SUP feed contains a list of all the SUP-ID’s of feeds that have been updated. ...

5 of 5 | New Stuff on the Work Front - From the work front: What have I been doing at work lately?  I’ve been spending a lot of time at work playing with SharePoint, the PowerShellToys’ PowerShellASP which lets you create ASP.NET apps with PowerShell script, and I set myself up with a brand new openSUSE 11 (this is a great distro) machine where I’ve been spending a lot of time in MonoDevelop. Speaking of PowerShell and ASP.NET – check out PoshBoard [at CodePlex], Antoine Habert’s PowerShell driven ajax portal.  Antoine has a nice little video on his blog. /n software has also made a small flurry of new announcements over the past week or so. New release – IP*Works! EDI/AS2 V8.  Another fresh round of Drummond cert tests a......